Wikiversity:Maintenance

Maintenance is one of the most important things that anyone can do at Wikiversity, along with teaching, learning and researching. Wikiversity constantly needs people to maintain the site, and anyone can get involved in maintaining Wikiversity. You don't have to ask - you can just pick some open tasks and get on with the job! Below you can find plenty of information and links to start you off with your maintenance "career" here. When you become better at maintenance tasks, you can start to identify new tasks that need doing and add them to the lists and categories.

If you stay around Wikiversity for long, and especially if you take part in maintenance, you'll soon come across the term custodian, which is what we call an "admin" or someone with "sysop privileges". Custodians have access to a few extra options on the MediaWiki interface, which enable them to do some maintenance operations faster, and do other maintenance operations which might have more radical effects on Wikiversity. For example, custodians can delete pages and block disruptive users. These operations are things which it is generally felt that not everyone should have access to. If you find a job which needs a custodian, then feel welcome to ask one!

Sometimes people decide it might be a nice idea to become a "custodian" themselves. If you want to: here's a quick how-to. First, realise that custodians (or admins) do a lot of pretty unpleasant boring jobs and end up sacrificing a lot of their family/holiday time. It's hardly a prestigious job. Secondly, before you even think of applying, get experience with a lot of the maintenance jobs below which anyone can do. This is a good way to show that you are suitable material for doing chores! But remember: if you enjoy making Wikiversity a better place by maintaining it, you don't have to be a custodian. Quite the opposite: ordinary users are especially welcome at the maintenance hub, and we hope the majority of people who come here will be ordinary users who just enjoy taking a few minutes to make Wikiversity a better place for everyone.

Oh - and finally, an especially big thank you to everyone who participates at the maintenance hub: